Ask any school age child what they know about magnetism and they will respond immediately with remarks about the curved pattern made by a magnet on powdered iron filings on a sheet of paper or a plate of glass and that is about all most of us know, or wants to know about the subject. After much reading in the scientific and theosophical literature, and much greater thought, I realised what a vast subject it is!Before us is a pair of magnets actually from an old telephone. Now, placed alongside they are just ordinary magnets, but hold them out and reverse the poles of that one, hold the magnets out at full length and try and put the opposite poles together, and the power is so great that it’s almost impossible.The power between those attracting and repelling poles is so intense it demonstrates the fact that invisibility has within it powers beyond our vision and comprehension and of course it was part of the teachings of Theosophy that all infinity is filled with such powers, almost all being beyond our comprehension with any of our senses. HP Blavatsky said that electricity and magnetism, each is the alter-ego of the other self, of the other one. Now, electricity will not pass through glass, glass is a perfect insulation for electricity, but magnetism will move that steel pin around as though there was nothing between it and the pin, or the needle as the case is, showing that it’s a different quality of power that flows through, from the magnet to the pin through the glass, different in degree but apparently in degree only, from electricity. And of course in another place HPB takes the matter further and say that even light, and ‘Fohat’ , come into the same expanded ramifications of magnetism.Placed alongside each other there appears to be no reaction, by reversing the poles of one of the pair, powerful opposition is revealed, and here let it be said and stressed, the intense power that keeps the opposing poles apart if invisible to our eyes, therefore this is an excellent illustration of the fact that invisibility can be and is, filled with powers immense in both variety and strength, all of which are invisible to us, here I’m reading the wrong set of papers which haven’t been amended. (finds other set)As everybody knows, it was Sir Isaac Newton who first propounded the theory of gravitation in our relatively modern world, although it has been known for ages to students of the ancient wisdom. But gravitation is only one half of the pair of the opposites of attraction and repulsion. Were gravitation the only force operating in nature, all substances in infinite space would already have been attracted into a small, densely compacted mass, with all the rest of infinite space devoid of manifestation of any kind. That as well as gravitation there is the equal and opposite force of repulsion. The operation of the laws of magnetism are not confined to material things. Everyone knows how a lamb, a calf, or a kitten, even a human baby, knows its own mother among a number of other females, without ever having to be taught to do so. Again, at some unheard signal hoards of birds and animals and insects know when it is exactly the right time for them to migrate, often from one continent to another, using magnetic pathways unknown to humans. Fish, and eels, leave their customary habitat, swim down streams and rivers to the open sea to find their natural breeding grounds, they and their progeny know how to find their way back through oceans, rivers and streams to places where their parents, and ancestors, have lived for who knows how many ages. Homing pigeons find their way home to their nests over hundreds of miles. But they’ll lose their way if a small magnet is fastened to their wings.One learns that through magnetism the great Hierarch of a galactic universe attracts to Itself all the beings with which he has been associated through vast periods of time, so that karma, which he and they have generated in the past and not yet equilibrated, that he and they may manifest once more and work to achieve a greater quality of harmony and equilibrium in conformity with the laws and principles of nature. It is magnetism that attracts us human beings to our own past karma, and no one else’s, through the working of cause and effect, of sowing and reaping, of attraction and repulsion, we learn how to calm the stormy waters of the great ocean of life in which we are immersed. In the process, we rise to a better understanding of both ourselves and our fellow human beings, whatever their degree of evolution, and to respect and work with, the laws of nature. More than that, eventually we learn the meaning of the saying that “when the student is ready, the master is waiting”. It is the student who has to attract the teacher. At that stage the student has doubtless has had some contact with that teacher, or the teachings he follows and lives, in other and past incarnations, his attraction has been engendered in other times and places and is not satisfied until in the present incarnation he finds either his former teacher, or the same teachers again, in this present life. Where, when and how does this attraction recommence in any particular life? That pinnacle of our being, our inner divine spark, knows that the time has come for all the lesser parts of our being to return to lesser phases of its being and desires to return so that they may gain their further experience and opportunity to evolve, and not only materially but intellectually and more still, and more importantly, to evolve spiritually. And so that divine spark descends, metaphorically but not literally, reclothing itself in all the various grades of vestures and habiliments which it has previously left behind, step by step, on its return home after the previous death of the physical body. Having magnetically attracted all these substances, which are its own, on the downward path, it enters Earth’s atmosphere and sphere of influence, there it awaits the time when its future parents with whom, either as parents or other relatives, or friends and close associates, it has lived before in many incarnations, and they are magnetically attracted to each other. The returning entity comes to the period of time, the race, the country, the social conditions, the parents, and no other, best suited for the returning entity to learn, understand, make some reparations for past thoughts and actions, and benefit from others in its past, and take a few more steps on the upward path toward wisdom. All the nutriment that the returning entity receives both before and after birth, and throughout life, all the atomic particles and sub-particles of food and water, even of the air we breathe, come to us through psycho-magnetic attraction, many of these substances have been used, also by others, both during our lifetime and in the period between death and rebirth, but some of them are particularly our own, but as we follow the pathway toward wisdom we take many of these other and lesser beings along with us, as far as we and they are capable of travelling.There are several other instances of the mysteries of magnetism that should be mentioned. All comets within our solar system obey the law of attraction and repulsion in that they return to their parent star, our sun, repeatedly. Gravitation draws them back to the sun, but repulsion by the sun not only causes the comet’s tail to be directed away from the sun, while the comet is skirting it, but also propels the comet away on its orbit that takes it far out into the confines of the solar system, to between the orbits of the planets Uranus and Pluto, there the energy or propulsion and the attraction are balanced and the latter takes over and draws the comet back to the sun, in the instance of Halley’s Comet, after a period of approximately 76 years. Another instance is the moon, the gravitation pull of the moon causes the rise and fall of the tides of ocean, but as well there are the tides of atmosphere, first discovered by scientists when beam radio waves were reflected back to earth by what later came to be known as the “Hepiside, layer”, named after its discoverer. There is also a tide of the crust of the earth, which rises and falls three and a half feet every day.Again, everyone will remember instances where they have been looking for something they have mislaid, have searched long and painstakingly for it without success, eventually finding it lying on the table in front of them all the time. The explanation for this phenomenon is that the polarity has been reversed, but whether it is the polarity of the object, or of the searcher that has been altered, or the method of making the change, is not explained.

Now there is also the attraction of friendship and the opposite repulsion where there is no friendship or likelihood of friendship, or where friendship that once existed has been lost. There are countless other instances of the working of magnetism within our observable experience, but there is an entire field of abstract thought on the subject known only to relatively few students, and understood only to real initiates in esotericism and occultism and their high Chelas. On page 78 of the Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, the Mahatma KH in the letter dated July, 1882, to his lay Chela, Alan Octavian Hume, in discussing the globes of the earth’s planetary chain, refers to the infinite ramifications of the number seven, and adds that he had just been permitted, for the first time, to give you the right figure. In commenting on this matter, Dr. de Purucker produces a diagram of 12 globes on seven cosmic planes. Seven of the globes, A,B,C and D, and D is our physical earth, with which we are all familiar, then E, F and G. These are on the lower four cosmic planes, and above and are called the Rupa Globes, that is the globes of form, above these are five globes on three cosmic planes, making seven cosmic planes and 12 globes, making the total of those globes as 12. The superior five are described as being arupa or formless, arupa and formless only to our consciousness which has neither the ability, or if we had the ability, the words, to frame and understand the meaning of those five higher globes. G. de P. then explains that each of these globes transmits magnetic forces tothe earth, that each of those magnetism differs in quality, strength, power, and degree, and that only one of the 12 is known to us, and within our experience.It also appears that there are other streams of magnetism flooding the Earth, continually, the major power base for earth is naturally the sun, but other great sources are the so-called 12 houses of the zodiac, which are constellations of stars within our home galaxy, begirt as it is by the Milky Way, but beyond thesolar system. These 12 streams of magnetism appear to be directed to the also so-called signs of the zodiac, which are areas within the auric egg of our earth, and which it seems, on the basis of genuine spiritual astrology, a carefully guarded secret of the ancient wisdom, and also of everyday popular astrology which knows comparatively little or nothing of the vast play of forces on the planets by the solar system and the variety of beings associated with it. The sun is the beating heart of the solar system, sending out, as each human heart does to all the ramifications of the physical body, a constant stream of energy, nourishment, that vitalises and revitalises it, the sun’s progeny. The sun has brought its progeny into manifestation and must support them until it’s, the sun’s, term of existence draws to a close. As for the earth, this stream of magnetism, this river of lives, this flood of consciousness, enters the earth at the North Pole and passes directly through to the South Pole. From there it flows around the surface of the earth, towards the North Pole, at that point to be recycled in the same way again and again. However, some of that energy leaves the earth at the South Pole and returns by the rivers of lives, the circulations of the cosmos within the solar system, to the sun, there to be refreshed and again sent forth through the arteries of the body and the solar system, to continue its work in the various planets of the solar system and eventually, of earth. There appear to be many manifestations of various forms and qualities or degrees of magnetism affecting the earth, otherwise how could such a variety of physical things, formed, the surface of the earth, why should the atmosphere of mountains be so refreshing and exhilarating unless it be that so much of earth’s magnetism is sent up these high points into the upper atmosphere. It is said that all infinite space is filled with positive particles, the source from which galaxies, solar systems, even atoms, and all other phases of manifestation, are composed, that great reservoir of substance to which everything returns after it has fulfilled its purpose and dies, disintegrates, resting, and then at the appropriate time recommencing the process of re-embodying. In one of the appendices at the end of Blavatsky’s Letters to A.P.Sinnett, is the statement that: “polarity ends”, or “polarity ceases”. Surrounding our earth is that continent of meteoric matter referred to, for the first time, by one of the Masters in the Mahatma Letters, it is the play of forces between the continent of ionised substance, invisible to our eyes because they have been constructed to see through it without perceiving it, that causes the many and various changes of seasons, the storms, the movements of atmosphere, going on continually above earth, in earth’s lower atmosphere. It is said that lightning is largely caused by human beings, and is nature’s way of seeking and achieving equilibrium. Everyone knows how refreshing the air is after a thunder storm.

There are countless other aspects of magnetism that could be mentioned but time places limitations on what can be said in a lecture. We as individuals are ceaselessly receiving, and sending out, magnetic emanations. The Master points out how one can be affected, even by shaking hands with an impure man, that is on page 462 if anyone wants to look it up in the Mahatma Letters. Again, he says, they know of no phenomenon in nature entirely unconnected with either magnetism or electricity. It acts in all planes of being, throughout the totality of infinite space, it ensures that all the karma of the past will continue into the future, and that the future can never end, thus, magnetism seems to be synonymous with infinity, karma, light, and enlightenment, the entire field of action and reaction, of good and evil, and of aspiration and exhortation. Thus far, nothing has been said about the dark side of magnetism, though there is something that should appropriately be mentioned. After the great physicist Sir JJ Thompson discovered the electron in 1898. The New Zealander Lord Rutherford became his student and later collaborator, at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in England. It was Rutherford and his co-workers who, in 1938, succeeded for the first time in splitting the atom. In his opinion it seemed, not a very great achievement, having been done on a small scale. The fact was that it was not the atom that had been split, but that was something that had been done countless times before, every atom is losing and receiving replacement particles with what has been called, by G. de P., vertiginous rapidity, present day scientists speak in terms of millions of billions of times a second. What

Rutherford had achieved, in a small way, was the disruption of the cohesive magnetism of the nucleus of the atom, and, after only seven years, two atom bombs, using the principles which he had discovered, were used to destroy two cities and many human lives. The power of magnetism is enormous and comprehensive, but we humans have inbuilt protection against those forces which we are incapable of controlling now. All space is filled with this teeming energy and vitality, filled also with endless forms of manifestations, beyond the ability of our senses to recognise. Nature strives for equilibrium within every galaxy, every solar system, and every atom, and, we can only surmise, throughout infinity, photographs of at least some of the galaxies show that there is evident balance in their composition. One particular picture shows a galaxy in the form of a perfect sphere, with a plane of rings around it similar to those surrounding our planets Saturn and Uranus, and the Van Allen belts surrounding our Earth. It also shows what appears to be an equal and balanced distribution of its contents. With reference to the expression “polarity ceases”, it seems that by such means, positive and negative attraction and repulsion cease in a particular location within the home galaxy, where all substance is reduced to a waveless homogeneity, unable to transmit the light of stars beyond them, and the stars we see are between those areas which astronomers refer to as a cloud of dust, and ourselves. But since nature wastes nothing, these areas will be used again and again, and the Hierarch who formally functioned there, after an appropriate period of rest, will return from Its appropriate heaven or para-nirvana, and declare and give the divine command: “Let there be light”, and manifestation to the same unchanging process of collecting substance, the hosts of lesser beings that formally used that substance and aiding their evolution for countless ages yet to come, as is happening in all the ceaseless sky with which we are familiar, for whether we understand or appreciate the fact or not, every human being and indeed every other being in infinite space is taking an active and appropriate part in this great cosmic drama of ceaseless unending spiritual evolution.

Perhaps synonymous with that striving for evolution, and the alternative striving for harmony and equilibrium, is the meaning of what Gautama Buddha referred to as “the middle way between extremes”, that same condition which Dr. de Purucker referred to as “the cement of the universe” and which the teacher Jesus is said to have stated as being “the fulfilling of the Law, cosmic Love”.

The text is from a lecture delivered at a meeting of the Theosophical Society (Pasadena) in Melbourne, Australia. The views expressed are those of the author, and not necessarily those of the Theosophical Society (Pasadena).